a result of the lack of internal principles of coherence, we have cause for joy and thanksgiving that our Church has manifested the power of her divine life by passing safely through the shocks of war and the convulsions of human prejudice. Here where nations have divided, and where battles have raged, the Church has stood a witness to that which is permanent, and as we meet here on the 12th of May, to consecrate the Church on the eve of the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the day on which the English colony reached the nearby Island of Jamestown, and as we think of the witness that Bruton bears to the continuity of the life and liturgy of the Church, "Let us come into His presence with thanksgiving and into His courts with praise." "For the Lord is gracious, his mercy is everlasting and his truth endureth from generation to generation."
Then, too, Bruton bears witness to
The Faith and Devotion of the Nation-Builders
The names presented here in bronze and in letters of gold have been inscribed upon or wrought into the structure of the temple with no vain spirit of ancestor worship, and with no desire or intention of simply glorifying men. They are placed here to the "Glory of God," and as an abiding witness to the truth. Most people are too much preoccupied to read the long annals of history; busy with routine work, or absorbed by routine pleasure they are prone to take the lessons of history at second or third hand and are satisfied with a superficial knowledge which they love to delude themselves into believing constitutes "culture." At the hands of these people the facts of history become woefully perverted. The impression is somewhat deepset that Virginia had a glorious, but a very godless past. With a reluctance to exploit herself by turning the searchlight of investigation down the path through which her history has run its famous course, with a preoccupation born of the stern necessities which war and subsequent poverty forced upon her people, she has for too long a time worn the garments of mourning and left her
